adywan said:

Andy Serkis' role in TFA has now officially been confirmed. He will be playing a character named Supreme Leader Snoke (click image for larger view).

So I'm guessing then that this "Supreme" leader Snoke might be the guy addressing the First Order rally that we saw in the trailer.

But if he's a motion-capture character then it's safe to assume that he's some kind of alien. I find that a pretty fascinating departure from the Empire that we know from the OT. The Empire pretty much consisted entirely of white men, which fitted well with the allusions to Nazism, colonialism and fascism in general. However now we have a supreme leader that's a non-human and Captain Phasma, who's clearly a very important military figure, is a woman. This is a very big departure from what we know. So the First Order is clearly quite different from the Empire that we saw thirty years ago.

(Also is a fascist regime without any form of racial or gender discrimination a form of social commentary on anything? The Empire were like a mix of Nazis and the British empire, so what would the First Order be an allusion to?)